


And Rot Inside a Corpse’s Shell

by mimsyborogove



Series: Frightening Fall Fic Fest [1]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Gen, Including a baby, Necromancy, SHFallFic, Week 2: Came Back Wrong, description of dead bodies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-15 06:16:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20861600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimsyborogove/pseuds/mimsyborogove
Summary: The tragic death of one of Madzie’s pet fish prompts a conversation about the consequences of necromancy, and Catarina shares one of her worst memories involving a resurrection gone wrong.





	And Rot Inside a Corpse’s Shell

**Author's Note:**

> I’m mixing canons a little, which I don’t usually do, but the Peru stuff is mentioned on the show, so I’m declaring that whole warlock squad vacation fair game to build show headcanons on. 
> 
> Title from Michael Jackson’s _Thriller._

Catarina stood in front of the open refrigerator, debating the merits of cooking a healthy meal from scratch, or just magicking a pizza from the restaurant down the street. It had been a long day, and her feet ached. But she should cook. She had been trying to teach Madzie to not rely on magic for everything, and she needed to be the one to set an example.

“Mama, one of my fish died,” Madzie said from behind her, just as she was about to reach for an onion to start a stir fry. 

Catarina dropped the onion back into the vegetable drawer and turned, expecting tears from her daughter, but Madzie just watched her expectantly, dark eyes wide. Catarina let Madzie lead her over to the large fish tank Magnus had helped her install for Madzie’s birthday, where one of the goldfish was indeed floating belly up. 

Catarina scooped the poor thing out of the water with a net, wondering what the best way to handle a fish funeral would be. Maybe she should call Magnus. 

“You can bring him back, right?” Madzie asked. 

Catarina set the net down and knelt in front of her daughter, taking her small hands. “I can’t sweetheart,” she said as gently as she could. “I’m sorry. I’m a healer, but once a life has ended, I can’t bring it back.”

“Nana could,” Madzie mumbled, looking down at her feet and refusing to meet Catarina’s eyes. 

Catarina’s heart sank. She had a lot of things to say about Iris Rouse, and none of them were good. When Magnus had first brought Madzie to Catarina—right after she had been held captive and manipulated by Valentine— it had been so hard to explain how someone who loved her, like Iris had, could also be a person who did terrible dark magic and hurt other people.

The world was rarely kind to warlock children, and Catarina ached for how Madzie had lost so much of the innocence of childhood so early, and how she’d had to relearn how to trust anyone who claimed to care for her. Madzie called Catarina ‘mama’ now, but it had been a long road getting there.

A lesson Catarina had tiptoed around, thinking there would be plenty of time when Madzie was a little older and less vulnerable, was how magic done out of love could still hurt someone, even if your intention was to help them.

“I think it’s time I told you a story,” Catarina sighed, moving to the couch and gesturing for Madzie to sit next to her. “It’s not a nice story, but it’s one I think you need to hear. It was while I was living with Uncle Magnus and Uncle Ragnor in Peru a long time ago...”

——

Catarina was technically on vacation, but she always had a hard time giving up her work for any length of time, and rumor spread quickly through the town that the trio of odd foreigners who had recently moved in contained a skilled healer. 

She had been shopping in the market with Magnus and Ragnor that day. It had been the heat of summer, a detail Catarina could never forget, and Magnus and Ragnor had been having one of their endless ridiculous arguments, this time over the fashionability of a hat Magnus had spotted as they made their way through the crowded street.

A young man grabbed Catarina by the elbow, startling her into dropping her basket of groceries and halting the boys’ bickering.

“Please, miss, my friend desperately needs your help,” the man said in a rush, his fingers tight on Catarina’s glamoured arm. “I have heard of how no one in this town died of the fever that spread last winter, and that you were responsible for that. Please, my friend needs a healer such as yourself.”

“What’s wrong with your friend?” Catarina asked. Magnus was translating the Spanish conversation under his breath for Ragnor, and Ragnor was giving her that exasperated look that said she had agreed to leave things up to the local doctors and midwives and actually enjoy her vacation. She ignored them both. 

“He has not been well since his wife and child died. I have not seen him outside since the funeral, and when I try to visit, he only tells me to go away.”

“I’ll see if I can talk to him, but there may not be anything I can do,” Catarina offered. “Grief can’t be rushed, and your friend may just need more time to mourn.”

The man shook his head. “I fear it is worse than that. There is something wrong with his home. It gives me an evil feeling when I come near it now. I think he has done something terrible.”

Catarina scooped up her dropped purchases and shoved them into Magnus’s arms. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” she said before either of the boys could protest. She could already hear the beginnings of a new argument between them before she made it out of earshot.

She followed the man to a house on the outskirts of the village, opposite of the direction Catarina lived with Magnus and Ragnor. 

He knocked cautiously on the door. 

“Julio, it’s Luis,” he called. “I’m worried about you, my friend. I’ve brought a healer to help you.”

Julio cracked the door open, one red rimmed eye peeking through the narrow opening. Through it, Catarina heard a sound that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, despite the heat of the day. It was the pitiful wail of a baby, but something about it sounded  _wrong_. 

“Was there another baby?” Catarina asked Luis under her breath, but she already knew what the answer would be.

Luis shook his head, his expression tight with concern.

“It was a mistake miss,” Julio said placatingly through the crack in the door. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. “The midwife thought my wife and son had passed, but she was mistaken. They are perfectly all right now.”

He moved to close the door, but Catarina stopped it with her foot, hiding a wince as Julio shoved the door harder, trying to shut it. “Your child sounds unwell,” she said. “Please let me help him.”

Julio tried to protest again that they were fine, but Luis moved to help her, finally forcing the door open. 

At the sight that met them, Luis screamed and turned on his heel, fleeing away from his friend’s house as fast as his legs could carry him without another word. Catarina had to swallow down her own scream and the urge to follow him. 

The curtains were all drawn, despite the bright sunshine outside, so the stench was what hit her first. The sickly smell of meat left out to rot in the heat. What seemed to be hundreds of flies buzzed through the dim room and crawled over the two figures within. 

A woman sat at the table, tied to a chair to keep her limp form propped up. As Catarina’s eyes adjusted, she noticed there was still grave dirt in the lank hair hanging over the woman’s face. The only sign that she was more than a corpse was the low moan rattling from her chest and the movement of her hands clawing at the arms of the chair. White bone poked out from the ends of her fingers as they scratched helplessly at the gouged wood. 

Next to her was a bassinet, from which the eerie wailing continued. From the doorway, all Catarina could see was a tiny molted gray fist waving from the dirty blankets, crawling with yet more flies. 

“What have you done?” Catarina murmured in horror. This was worse than she had imagined. 

“I saved them,” Julio hissed, trying to shove Catarina back out the door, but she refused to budge, magic helping her dig her heels into the floor. “The midwife took them from me, and I found someone to help me take them back. They just need more time to get better.”

“They’re rotting,” Catarina said. “Even if you managed to put their souls back, their bodies are still rotting around them.”

It was the simplest path to necromancy, calling a soul back into its corpse. Any warlock with basic training, the right spellbook, and a severe lack of morals could have done it for him. 

All paths to necromancy came with consequences, all of them terrible in their own ways, but this one was especially cruel for the person brought back. Their body would continue to decompose, and no matter the state it deteriorated into, their soul would remain tied to their corpse until someone broke the spell.

The woman’s head jerked up, awkward and uncoordinated, turning towards Catarina. Her pallid skin hung away from her skull, and a fly walked right across one of her blank, milky eyes. “Help... us...” she hissed out through a jaw that no longer moved like it should. 

Her head dropped back down to stare into the bassinet she couldn’t reach. 

Catarina stepped forward despite Julio’s attempts to stop her, then froze as a fresh wave of horror washed over her when she was able to see the baby clearly. Half his head was bashed in, one of his eyes no longer entirely in the broken socket. Despite this, he kept crying that unearthly cry and waving his tiny fists, as if he were reaching for someone to comfort him.

“She didn’t mean to hurt him,” Julio was stammering, inserting himself between Catarina and the remains of his family. “It was the shock of coming back. She’s getting better. They’re both getting better.”

“They’re suffering,” Catarina breathed out, unable to take her eyes off the baby’s ruined face, picturing the scene in her mind. The mother brought back to this horror, thinking that she could save her child from it by killing him again. But the body was already dead, and the soul remained trapped in an even more damaged corpse. “You have to let them go.”

How mad with grief did someone have to be to think having his family back like _this_ was better than losing them? How long would he have let them stay like this if his friend hadn’t found her to intervene?

Catarina heard the pounding of running footsteps, then the sound of Ragnor swearing loudly behind her. The feeling of Magnus’s hand on her shoulder. 

“Do whatever you need to do to help them,” Magnus murmured in her ear, knowing that in this case, the only help possible was allowing them to die. “We’ll get him out of here.”

There was a brief scuffle, then Magnus and Ragnor were dragging a wailing and thrashing Julio out of the house between them, leaving Catarina alone with the reanimated corpses. 

Catarina wove the spell between her fingers as fast as she could, murmuring incantations in Latin under her breath, her glamour dropping as she concentrated, revealing the blue skin underneath. The proper way to reverse necromancy was to destroy the original spell used, but Catarina didn’t know it, or the warlock who had cast it, and she didn’t have the time to figure it out.

A white glow engulfed her hands, the occasional pale spark falling from her fingertips. This was a spell she only used as a last resort, when someone was too far gone to heal and their pain was greater than her ability to help them manage. A spell to unbind a person’s soul from their body, allowing them to pass peacefully and painlessly into death. 

She prayed it would work now. 

Julio’s wife jerked her head back up like a broken puppet to stare at her while she worked the spell. 

She brushed a glowing hand over the baby’s forehead first, unable to bear his pain for any longer than necessary. The glow of the magic seeped into his skin, and his cries stopped. When he finally lay still in his bed, his unbroken eye closed as if he had gone to sleep, Julio’s wife relaxed, her body going slack against her restraints.

_She didn’t mean to hurt him_, Julio’s voice echoed in Catarina’s mind. All she wanted was for her baby’s suffering to end. 

“Thank... you...” Julio’s wife sighed out as Catarina passed the other hand over her eyes. The brightness of the magic faded, and her body stilled as well, other than the movement of a stray maggot wriggling through her hair. 

Their souls were no longer trapped, but Catarina wouldn’t be finished until their bodies were taken care of. She tried to block the horror of it from her mind so she could work, focusing only on the tasks that had to be completed. She cast spells to shoo away the flies and other insects drawn by the stench of rot, and conjured a clean sheet to spread out on the floor.

She cut the mother’s body from the chair and held her breath while she moved the heavy corpse to the sheet and laid her out in the center of it before turning to the baby.

Upon closer inspection, the dirty blanket he was wrapped in was a quilt, lovingly patched together, and probably what he had been buried in. Catarina banished the dirt and mildew away as best she could, and carefully rewrapped the blanket with a little extra magic to keep the child’s broken skull held together so she could lay him into the crook of his mother’s arm before wrapping them both in the clean sheet, ready to be moved when she found where their graves had been before Julio had disturbed them. 

Catarina left the dark house, needing fresh air and a moment to gather herself before she could think about how to go about finding their graves. She waved her wrist, and a wash bin full of nearly scalding water appeared in the yard away from the house and it’s horrors. She plunged her hands into the basin and tried to scrub the feeling of rot and insects off her skin. 

Hands on her shoulders pulled her away from the water some time later. “You won’t have any skin left if you keep that up for much longer,” Ragnor’s voice hissed in her ear. 

Catarina slumped against him and realized she was shaking. The water in the basin had gone cold and was tinged with pink.

“Are you all right?” Ragnor murmured, more gently, the hands on her shoulders sliding down to her hands, a burst of green sparks undoing whatever damage she had done to them. She hadn’t noticed how they stung until they suddenly didn’t.

Catarina shook her head, pressing her forehead against Ragnor’s shoulder, where the smell of his cologne could block out the memory of the stench inside the house for a moment. “No,” she said, muffled into his shirt. “But I’m not finished. The bodies need to be buried properly, and warded against further necromancy.”

“I’ll help you,” Ragnor said. “Magnus is with the husband. He said I was a ‘less than comforting’ presence for the moron.”

Magnus had the unique skill of turning his anger into kindness. It was a skill Ragnor did not share. Catarina wasn’t even sure she would have been able to stay professional enough to help Julio after what she had just done.

But Catarina knew Magnus would still be able show Julio kindness, despite his own horror, and he would do whatever it took to ease Julio’s suffering, even if it meant taking the memories of the botched resurrection. 

She also knew Magnus would find out the name of the warlock who had been unscrupulous enough to take advantage of a man lost deep in the madness of grief, and their next mission would be to find that warlock and turn them over to the Spiral Labyrinth. 

She took one more deep breath scented with familiar citrus and tea before pulling away from Ragnor. 

First they had to bury the bodies. 

——

“I’ve been alive for a long time, and I’ve seen many terrible things, but that was the worst thing I’ve seen someone do out of love,” Catarina explained. “One of the hardest things a warlock has to learn is how to let go of the ones we love when it’s their time. Trying to keep them with us only hurts them.”

She softened the details of the story as she told it to Madzie, but she could still see everything burned clear in her mind, well over a century later. The heat, the stench, the buzzing of the flies, the haunting cries of the baby.

How Ragnor had comforted her then, and how his body had been the most recent one she’d had to bury, and how hard it still was to let him go.

Memories were strange things. A good memory could fade around the edges, leaving an impression of the feeling of the moment more than the details of it, but a truly bad memory could stand out in stark detail for eternity. 

Catarina felt a sudden worry that her strongest memories of her late friend would all become tied into some of her worst memories, while the details in the good memories—the sound of his voice, the smell of his cologne— faded away.  One of the many dangers of immortality was letting the bad memories outnumber the good, until you lost touch of the things that made life worth living. 

“Let me tell you another story,” Catarina said, her arm around Madzie, who snuggled in against her. They would figure out dinner later. “A happier one.” She closed her eyes and tried to capture this memory in as much detail as the last one. “Did I ever mention how Ragnor became the Loch Ness Monster?”


End file.
